When a creature apparently has the ability to instantly digest anything it eats, allowing it to eat things several times its size with no change to its own shape, or swallow living creatures (again, often larger than itself) with no resistance from within. Such a creature can swallow a sword wielding knight or a live velociraptor, but there's no problem since they seem to instantly dissolve the second they enter the stomach.
Eat the Bomb may depend on this. If one is able to regurgitate any of the items they ingested, they may possess a Stomach of Holding. Compare Hyperactive Metabolism and Nobody Poops. Almost any character with this trope is a Big Eater. Contrast Balloon Belly and Dinner Deformation (where a consumed object visibly deformed the eater, usually for comedy) and Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth (where a character attempts to eat another but ultimately rejects the latter).
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Gluttony in Fullmetal Alchemist can eat things in vast excess of his size because his mouth leads to a whole Pocket Dimension.
- Vanilla Ice (also known as Cool Ice) from the Third Part of Jojos Bizarre Adventure has a Stand called "Cream" that weaponizes this trope. Cream appears as a demonic humanoid figure and whilst presumably capable of fighting in the manner of the other humanoid Stands, its special ability is that its jaws lead to a mysterious void dimension — not even Vanilla Ice knows what lies beyond them. This allows Cream to effectively erase anything it eats by transporting them into this dimension. Sounds like a lame power, right? Wrong. Cream's primary way of attacking is to eat itself, which turns it into basically an invisible floating sphere that annihilates any matter it touches. To make things worse, Cream can swallow Vanilla Ice whole without disintegrating him, so Vanilla Ice can avoid the "kill the Stand User to stop the Stand" weakness by hiding inside the invisible sphere of annihilation. The only drawback is that Vanilla Ice can't see without peeking out through Cream's mouth every so often, but that's a minor weakness in his ability to destroy everything around him. This power lets him instantly kill Avdol, one of the titular Stardust Crusaders, and permanently cripple a second, Polnareff.
- America from Hetalia: Axis Powers really should not be able to eat a stack of hamburgers half his height in less than ten seconds, but...
- Digimon Frontier has the heavyset Junpei (J.P.) attempt to win an eating contest in episode seventeen. He's leaning back in his chair with a noticeable bulge in his stomach while Izumi (Zoe) has over forty clean plates in front of her and is demanding more. Takuya lampshades it in both languages.
- My Daemon: Kento's Deamon, Anna, has the power to absorb objects and store them inside her for future use. She can even absorb items much bigger than herself, and what she absorbs remains unchanged until she releases it again (a plate of food she absorbed was still warm as if freshly prepared when she released it 3 days later). There are limits however; she can only store dead and inanimate objects, but has trouble with living things.
- In Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl, Ash's Gible takes this to ridiculous extremes on multiple occasions, most notably managing to completely devour some of Team Rocket's gigantic mechas without putting on any visible weight, despite being a diminutive two foot tall land shark. Thankfully, it doesn't have any interest in eating anything other than inanimate objects.
- Played for Drama in Toriko. NEO, the final villain of the story, can eat anything. It can even eat its opponent's attacks, absorbing their power, then simply eat the opponent as well.
- Guu in Haré+Guu has an alternate universe inside her. Characters and objects, including Haré, can be swallowed and later re-emerge undamaged except perhaps for some unsettling memories of the experience. Some minor characters exist only in that inside-Guu universe.
Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering gives us atogs, which can eat machinery, forests, corpses, enchantments, cards in hand, or even time. There's also Atogatog, which eats other atogs. Anything you feed an atog boosts its stats.
Comic Books
- Quite literally with Green Lanterns villain Singularity Jain. At one point she swallows the entire Justice League, thought John Constantine and Sara Cruz are able to save them.
Comic Strips
- An issue of the Garfield comics had Garfield gulp down Jon in one bite. Justified as it was All Just a Dream. Though he does regularly eat piles of food that are larger than his entire body.
Films — Animated
- Despicable Me 2: Minions who have been treated with the PX-41 mutagen have this power. One is shown to eat a police car and even a nuclear bomb with no ill effects.
- Trolls Band Together: At one point Poppy's long-lost sister Viva drinks a milkshake twice her size and it doesn't show.
- Yellow Submarine: In the Sea of Monsters, the Vacuum Monster eats several other animals its own size or larger without changing size or shape, before finally eating itself.
Films — Live-Action
- Audrey II of Little Shop of Horrors. Much like Kirby, there's really no place for the bodies to go. Truth in Television: Audrey is a carnivorous plant. While it has the "mouth" characteristic of a Venus Flytrap, it must also share traits with a "pitcher plant," which traps and dissolves unsuspecting bugs in its juices. Chewing human flesh breaks it up and makes it easier to dissolve.
- Conversed in the song Peth Hai Ya Black Hole (Stomach or Black Hole?) from The Return of Hanuman, describing Maruti being a Big Eater.
- Referenced in Creepshow, when a professor perplexedly marvels at how many people the creature from "The Crate" has managed to consume in a matter of hours, yet still fit into said crate.
- Serleena from Men in Black II zigzags this. On the one hand, when she inhales a whole human at the start of the film, she does get a Balloon Belly, but a relatively small one that makes her look more like she's pregnant than that she just ate a whole person with a good foot of height on her. On the other hand, she is implied to be constantly snacking on fast food throughout the film, but never gains an inch. Then subverted when Jeff the worm swallows her and she promptly consumes him from the inside, growing so large that her bursting out of him is less Chest Burster and more "snake explosively shedding its skin". Justified in that she's an alien planimal, so Bizarre Alien Biology is definitely in effect.
- In the film version of My Favorite Martian, at the climax, Lizzie displays absolutely no signs of any abdominal distension after gulping down a fairly large human man with fairly little chewing whilst using the Veenox 7 Nerplex to assume the form of a monstrous lizard-squid alien. Even when she reverts to her fairly petite human form, there's nothing left of her victim outside of the Burp of Finality she emitted before spitting our the Nerplex.
- Goose the Cat from Captain Marvel (2019) is actually a flerken, an incredibly rare and dangerous alien that can swallow pretty much anything it wants. Goose herself eats an entire squad of Kree soldiers and the Tesseract without any difficulty, and without losing her guise as an adorable kitty.
Literature
- Holo from Spice and Wolf is a petite girl capable of eating impossibly large meals (including an entire roasted pig) without her belly ever getting even slightly distended. The secret is that her true form is a wolf the size of a house, so whatever she eats while in human form is essentially being sent to a pocket dimension however big said wolf's stomach is.
Music
- Amber und Gefährten on their album Bardensang: in the Zwergenlied (dwarf song) the main character is a dwarf able to drink anything in inordinate amounts without getting drunk, preferring wine, wine, mead and beer. He drinks so much that magicians check him out where the alcohol goes: through a hole within the dwarf into another dimension.
Tabletop Games
- Trolls from Warhammer, thanks to having stomachs full of Hollywood Acid that can dissolve just about anything, will digest pretty much everything they swallow with great rapidity.
- While most monsters from Dungeons & Dragons do have rules for swallowed creatures fighting their way out, some cause pretty much instant death, from either acid or intense heat. There is also the hellworm, a normal earthworm turned into a demonic Sand Worm by a literal gate to hell conjured inside its maw, which tries to deaden the constant pain by stuffing itself with anything too slow to get out of its way.
- In Changeling: The Dreaming, anything eaten by a redcap is destroyed almost instantly. The only exception are Treasures, which hang out indefinitely until the redcap is killed and cut open.
Video Games
- Kirby, of course. Especially since he's about a foot tall. One game actually has usage of his interior as Hammerspace as a gameplay mechanic, and it looks like an entire universe in there. The Hypernova ability in Kirby: Triple Deluxe takes this trope to its Logical Extreme. The Miracle Fruit turns Kirby's stomach into a black hole, powering up Kirby's inhale and allowing him to devour practically anything that gets in his way, regardless of how big it is.
- The main characters of The Munchables, Chomper and Munchy, are small, limbless gluttons that have appetites that could rival Kirby's. Their sizes and appearances change depending on how much they eat.
- Chomper from the Plants vs. Zombies series can devour an unlimited buffet of zombies, so long as he has the time to chew and swallow them. He has his limits, however, as it's never possible to eat Gargantuars.
- In Super Smash Bros Brawl, aside from Kirby himself, King Dedede and Wario of all characters (Despite never having this quality in any of his games) also possess this, being able to eat almost any item using their neutral special attack. They'll become deformed if they eat something huge like a crate or party ball, but will return to normal a few seconds later.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Yoshi can swallow most anything, especially in his original appearance where he can gulp down car-sized Mega Moles. Later games have him process the corpses into eggs, but he can still do it instantly.
- On the villainous side, there are two: Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars gives us Belome, who eats a character, spits him (or her) out, and creates a clone. Before that, or even Yoshi, though, there was Boss Bass, who could swallow even big Mario whole.
- Pac-Man: While the titular character is mostly known for eating small pellets (and ocasionally ghosts when he gets powered up) he's also capable of eating fruits, bells or a key in a single bite.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: Bow-Wow, a tiny Chain Chomp who can eat giant carnivorous flowers (and any other enemy in the game) in one bite.
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: Dmitri is a friendly, mountable Dodongo who possesses the same ability.
- Any game where you restore hit points by eating food. If you have to restore a lot of points with cheap, weak food items, you may have to chow down a lot.
- Subverted in Tales Series though, as you can't make your party have more than one meal straight before entering a single battle at least, even if they didn't get their HP and SP fully restored.
- Final Fantasy has Atomos, a recurring summon/boss with what appears to be a literal blackhole for belly. Its signature attack is called "Wormhole" and its ability to remove a character from the battle in earlier installments is a mild example. The horrific one comes into play in Final Fantasy IX where Atomos is used to attack Lindblum, eventually wiping out a whole city district and sucking half the population into the void.
- The Ultra Beast Guzzlord from Pokémon Sun and Moon may be this, as its Pokedex description reads that when it eats it apparently does not produce droppings.
- The main mechanic of Eat Me: you're a child with a stomach magically turned into an all-consuming force of hunger and locked in a castle where everyone and everything is made out of food. The solution to the majority of the puzzles involves eating something. You can even eat a second force of hunger, which is key to getting the Golden Ending.
Web Comics
- One strip of Inside The Gamer's Studio featured Naru from Love Hina demanding snacks before her interview, whereupon the host, Whit, places a large chocolate cake down, and Naru devours the entire thing in one bite, with no visible difference in the next panel.
Whit: Wow, Naru! That was like 20,000 calories!
Naru: Don't worry. I'm on a special diet.
Whit: Ah yes, the "Anime Diet".
Naru: Yup! Eat as much as you want, and always look the same! - Aylee from Sluggy Freelance. People she eats just seem to vanish the minute she swallows them.
- Molly and Golly from The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! can eat vast amounts of food without ill effect. Once, after practically emptying a walk-in refrigerator full of food, their bellies were a little distended for one panel; then they were instantly back to normal.
- The Cyantian Chronicles: Quinn claims to have a subspace stomach after putting away a table's worth of food
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- Damien from White Dark Life being a gluttony demon is designed to just keep eating. Unlike most examples on this page though, he does have a theoretical limit. That limit being roughly an entire planet.
- Implied in the Hazbin Hotel official comic "A Day in the Afterlife;" Alastor attacks a butcher several times larger than him who threatens a female sheep demon and most likely devoured him. Despite eating the butcher, his stomach remains the same size.
Western Animation
- Duck Dodgers: In "Deathmatch Duck", Dodgers tricks the alien captain (Taz) into swallowing him whole. Cut to a viewer complaining about how it doesn't make sense, because Dodgers is taller than Taz and yet is shown comfortably standing up in his belly.
- Futurama: Nibbler, who isn't much larger than a cat, as well as his species, the Nibblonians. He compresses everything he eats into hyperdense Dark Matter, which is what he defecates. That doesn't explain how he was able to eat himself to escape the universe, though.
- Gertie the Dinosaur: Gertie swallows a tree as large as herself and tops it off by drinking down an entire lake, but her size doesn't increase.
- Hey Arnold!: In "Chocolate Turtles" Gerald's little sister Timberly eats forty boxes of the titular chocolates in one sitting, but it makes no difference to her waistline.
- The first episode of Jellystone! dealt with Cindy giving Yogi a nuclear powered stomach that is an endless void inside, so he wouldn't have to pick which meal not to eat at lunch. Unfortunately, Yogi's total lack of self control leads him to ravenously devour everything and everyone in town.
- Lilo & Stitch: The Series: Experiment 606, AKA "Holio", was designed for this to the point where he literally becomes a black hole.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Most characters can do this, but especially Pinkie Pie. On at least one occasion she's eaten a cake larger than she was with no real change to her physique.
- Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures: Like his original videogame depiction, Pac-Man is this.
- Also in the episode "No Pets Allowed....Especially Monsters!", a small monster Pac-Man decides to keep as a pet is able to eat as much, if not more than him.
- Scooby-Doo: Shaggy and Scooby manage to do this in some incarnations of the franchise, often with a massive Dagwood Sandwich.
- The Penguins of Madagascar: Rico uses his black hole of a stomach for storage. His stomach isn't a black hole, it's just much Bigger on the Inside. How big? Mort had to ride an elevator down to the lower levels of Rico's stomach!
- Tiny Toon Adventures: Dizzy Devil once ate a stealth bomber with little trouble.
